


The Point of Impact

by MagpieWendigo



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Depression, Dreams and Nightmares, Grief/Mourning, M/M, POV First Person, POV Will Graham, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 21:22:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20513684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieWendigo/pseuds/MagpieWendigo
Summary: Over time you find that the darkness is nothing more than a mirror, and, with mounting terror, discover the creature you so relentlessly pursued but could never catch was only your reflection.





	The Point of Impact

**Author's Note:**

> an exploration of survivor's guilt.

Hannibal.

Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal. I feel the way my mouth moves when I say his name. Breathy, warm, round at the front, my tongue curling gently around the tapered end of the L behind my teeth. It tastes like honey and blood, rust in my throat. _Hannibal._

I know they’re just patronizing me. I can see it in their eyes, in the way they glance at each other when they think I’m not looking. The whispers that die when I walk into the room. When Jack asks me if I’m okay, when Alana asks if I’m really ready to go back. Chilton, with his smug, high and mighty, know-it-all attitude, overcompensating for the fact that he knows nothing. Even Beverly, who I thought I could trust with anything, draws her hand back a fraction of a second faster, chooses emails over phone calls. Doubting Thomases, all of them. 

I know what happened. _Is_ happening. What would it take to make them believe? Must they line up and one by one press their hand into the wound in my side? They treat me like a broken messiah. Elevated and apart, but somehow lesser. A perversion of the man they thought they knew. If only I could make them see _they are looking at the wrong man_. 

“Why won’t you just let it go?” they ask. 

“Let what go?” I reply, waiting, begging them to speak the truth. They all avoid saying his name. Hannibal.

My head rolls to the side, room spinning, blinking slowly. The soft blue numbers on my clock come into focus. It’s 3am. The Devil’s hour, I think, and I laugh. It sounds vulgar, erupting from between my lips like the cough of a dying man. I find the concept of laughter so absurd that I laugh again. A short, hollow bark that serves only to amplify the silence that follows. I try to breathe, but my aching chest refuses to expand. All I want is to close my eyes. Still staring at the clock, I watch the numbers bleed and blur until I realise my heart is beating in time with the digital seconds. I am numb, willing myself into a cadaver-like stillness with anticipation of dreamless sleep as my focus begins to drift… and then I hear it from the corner of my room. It comes from the shadows cast by the barren tree out front, shifting but eternally dark, black as blood in the moonlight. 

_“Hello, Will.”_

I cannot speak.

A shape begins to form in the darkness, gathered like so many broken branches into a facsimile of a man. With a sigh, part of the shadow detaches itself from the wall and begins to make its way to my bed. 

_“Hello, Will.”_ it rattles again. Not a real voice, more like dead leaves scraping along a sidewalk. More like the sound of the ocean in a seashell- it’s fine to pretend but you know all you really hear is the sound of your own blood rushing in your ear. 

Sometimes the thing I see approaching me appears to have antlers, other times, too many arms, sometimes it limps, sometimes it runs, but always I feel the words echo in my bones: _“Hello, Will.”_

I remember lying there in a growing pool of blood, some my own, some… not mine. I can smell the sickroom-sting of the thick, dark arterial fluid, pulsing out along the path of least resistance. I am now, and I am then, and I feel the heat become pain along scars old and new. I am devoid of faith. 

_“Will.”_ the homunculus stands at impossible angles, still as death but always moving.

“Y..you..” something catches in the back of my throat. Blood? Phlegm? Tears? “You were supposed to leave,” I manage to choke out. 

The shadowed straw man raises what I think it thinks is a hand, cracking and crunching as it shifts to adapt its shape for this movement. _“I did,”_ it whispers. 

Breathing becomes harder than ever. Pain rips across my torso like a firecracker, impossibly loud, bright, instantaneous, burning. “No.” I tell the creature. It continues to reach. “You were supposed to leave,” I rasp, “with me.” 

For a brief moment the fragmented shadow solidifies into a terrifyingly familiar silhouette. My vision kaleidoscopes with tears, from pain or despair I do not know. I do not want to know. 

_“I did.”_ its voice more solid, too, the lilting, almost musical European accent only slightly out of tune. It rests its broken hand on my sweat-slick forehead, and I think of an apple rotting from the inside out. It leans into the moonlight shining through my bare windows and slowly facial features take shape. A strong profile, gentle aquiline nose, sharp cheekbones, sunken eyes, grim but sophisticated mouth, nothing but angles and planes and yet somehow still achingly soft and beautiful. I remember a sculpture I saw once, with a man's hand pressing into the supple flesh of a woman’s thigh, how it seemed so convincing that I couldn’t help myself reaching out to feel for myself when no one was looking; the shock of my fingertips meeting cold, unyielding marble. Then, as now, my mind could not reconcile the hope of my heart with the truth of my eyes.

I want to pull away from the creature’s touch, but I still cannot move. It caresses my face, leaving behind a trail of tingling flesh. I think of cobwebs. I realize, then, that if I name this thing, this nightmare, it will disappear. Like Rumplestiltskin. I take several short, gasping, burning lungfuls of air, and with a desperate cry somewhere between a whisper and a sob, I say your name. 

_“Hannibal!”_

My visitor, which had begun to smile in a lopsided fashion that revealed a mouth full of ink and broken sticks where there should have been teeth, snaps back into shapeless nothing like a film being rewound at double speed. It merges with the trembling shadow of the tree across the room and I wait for the relief that is supposed to come crashing down after the adrenaline rush of fear. But the weight is not lifted, the pain does not recede; still awake I turn my gaze to the ceiling. I can feel the warm tracks of tears running down my cheeks and pooling in my ears.

I remember slowly returning to the waking world, so cold that I had ceased to shiver, sand in my hair, water in my lungs. Seafoam lapping at my ankles (our ankles). I remember opening my eyes to find you there, next to me in a way that I had longed for on the lonely nights in my jail cell, and later the lonely nights in bed with my wife. You were there with parted lips, gazing into my face with sightless eyes, your body crumpled driftwood, nothing where it should be. Covered in seaweed and streams of saltwater mingling our blood as it was carried back out to sea. That was when the real madness set in.

There is no place in the world for monsters like us. We left together, I took you with me. No amount of medication or therapy can save me from the memory of returning alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> please leave a comment if you want more chapters to this one, i'm rather fond of writing nightmares.


End file.
